


Butterfly Dreams

by Anonymous



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (Hunk and Lance use he/him pronouns for Pidge because she's not out to them yet), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Gen, Misgendering, Saami Holts, Slow Burn, Synesthesia, Trans Female Pidge | Katie Holt, Underage Smoking, platonic relationships are so important y'all
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-02
Updated: 2017-02-16
Packaged: 2018-09-21 13:00:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9550241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Everyone wants something, although some theologians would disagree.Matt Holt, for example, would like to catch a break.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who's procrastinating again~

The night wind cut through Pidge’s shirt easily, and not for the first time tonight, she wished she wasn’t wearing cargo shorts.   
  
Too late now to go back inside: if she left now, she might miss something in the alien radio chatter.   
  
Voltron, voltron, voltron. What even was a voltron? Everything was in alien, so for all she knew voltron just meant I, or something.   
  
«—can anyone hear me?»  
  
Pidge nearly fell off the roof. Was that…  
  
«C’mon, someone, anyone, answer me!»  
  
She knew that voice. Knew it like she knew her own. Her heart was beating fast in her chest, she just needed to find her transmitter—  
  
“Come here to rock out?”  
  
She jumped nearly a foot in the air, all the air leaving her lungs in a single moment. Lance was crouched down behind her, Hunk crawling around to her tech like an incredibly oversized cat with a new toy.   
  
“No. Now shut up a moment.” She dug the transmitter out of her bag, tuning her radio to stay on the frequency.   
  
«I’m entering lower atmosphere. If anyone can hear this, please don’t shoot me down.»  
  
“What the hell is that?” Hunk asked, pointing to a bright light in the sky. “Is that an asteroid?”  
  
“Vïelle, I hear you,” Pidge said into her radio. “What are your landing coordinates?”  
  
“I can’t believe what I’m seeing!” Lance held Pidge’s binoculars up to his face. “That’s a ship, and not one of ours!”  
  
«Åabpa? Is that you?»  
  
“Pidge, what are you doing with that radio?” Lance asked.  
  
“Yeah, who are you talking to?” Hunk echoed.  
  
“I’ll explain later,” she said to everyone. “What are your landing coordinates?”  
  
There was a crackle of static from the radio, a faint _can’t read anything on this damn thing_ , and then «Three-five degrees, one-zero minutes, and one-nine seconds north, and one-one-eight degrees, eight minutes, and five-six seconds west.»  
  
“Copy that, three-five degrees, one-zero minutes, and one-nine seconds north, and one-one-eight degrees, eight minutes, and five-six seconds west.” She scribbled the numbers down as she repeated them, finding it on the map easily—the edge of the Tehachapis, only about twenty miles from them. If they stole a car, they could make it before he landed. “We’ll meet you there.”  
  
«Looking forward to it.» The radio crackled out.  
  
“What was that?” Lance demanded.   
  
“Can you hotwire a car?” she replied, ignoring the question.  
  
“No? Why would I be able to hotwire a car? What’s going on here, anyway?”   
  
“No time to explain,” she said. The garage wasn’t far from this roof, and she remembered seeing the keys stored on hooks along one wall. She might not even need to hotwire it, if the keys were there.  
  
Lance grabbed her by the shoulders. “Oh no you don’t. You’re going to explain things, _right now._ I’m not going anywhere until you tell us what’s going on!”  
  
Pidge sighed. “Then don’t come with me, but I’m going and you can’t stop me.”  
  
“Uh, yeah, I can.”  
  
“Pidge,” Hunk said, “Whatever’s going on—we’re your friends. You can trust us.”  
  
“Alright, fine. You know how the Kerberos mission went missing a year ago?”  
  
“Uh, yeah, you freak out every time the teachers mention it.”  
  
“They’re alive and I can prove it. I had radio contact with that ship, and I’m going to be there when it lands.”  
  
“We’re coming with you,” Lance said.   
  
“We are?”  
  
“You are?”  
  
“Yeah? Obviously? Dude, this is the adventure of a lifetime, I’m so in. Besides, Iverson said we need to bond as a team. We were practically _ordered_ to do this.”  
  
“No, we really weren't,” Hunk said.  
  
“Not even close,” Pidge added.   
  
—  
  
Stealing a Garrison car was surprisingly easy. Pidge clearly knew what he was doing, pulling a key off the wall and jamming it into the ignition.   
  
“C’mon, you damn thing, start!” he snarled as he twisted the key around. If he twisted it any more harshly, it was going to break off.   
  
“Uh. Pidge,” Lance said, “Do you even know how to drive a car?”  
  
“What does it _look_ like, dumbass?”  
  
“Well, luckily, _I_ know how to drive. Shove over and let me do it.”  
  
“Nope, I crashed once today in the simulator, I don’t want to do it again in real life.”  
  
“Driving a car and flying a spaceship are very different skillsets!”  
  
“Guys, maybe neither of you should—okay. You’re just going to fight over it. _That’s_ unexpected.” Hunk sighed. “Why are you two like this.”  
  
Before Lance really knew what was happening, Hunk was in the driver’s seat, Pidge was shotgun with the map spread over his knees, and Lance was pouting in the back.   
  
“We’re going to be in so much trouble,” Hunk said as he pulled out of the garage. “Pidge, where are we going?”  
  
“West, all the way to the Tehachapis.”  
  
The jeep rumbled and shook. Lance bounced with every loose stone, the seatbelt digging into his shoulder.   
  
“Can’t you go any faster?” Pidge complained.   
  
“The speed limit’s twenty miles per hour, I can't just _break the law,_ Pidge!”  
  
“We’re in a stolen car and you’re worried about the _speed limit?_ ”  
  
A flash of light out of the corner of his eye made Lance turn in his seat. Headlights were following them.   
  
“Hunk, we’re being followed!”  
  
Hunk grumbled something and they suddenly sped up. Lance hit the back of the seat with a small oof.  
  
“So, Pidge,” he said. “Gonna explain what you were doing out there in the first place? Who you were radioing, anyway, the pigeon mothership?”  
  
“You’re hilarious and original.” He paused for a while, and Lance could imagine him bringing his knees up to his chest. “Can we agree to not talk about this yet?” There was an odd note in his voice—something Lance didn’t dare push at. He knew what grief sounded like.   
  
“Oh my god,” Hunk said. “I totally just realized something.”  
  
“ _What_ ,” Pidge snapped.  
  
“Nothing, never mind, tell you later. Are we still being followed?”  
  
Lance glanced behind them. There they were: a stream of headlights trailing behind them. “Yup. Not sure if they’ve realized that we’re not, like, official Garrison officers investigating and that we’re really a bunch of meddling teens? But I really don’t want them to find out.”  
  
“Wonderful,” Hunk grumbled.  
  
“If we speed up, we might be able to lose them,” Lance said.   
  
“Nope. Not speeding up.”  
  
“Hunk!” Pidge said.   
  
“What if there’s something in the road? Like, a really lost hiker! I’ll be going too fast to stop and I’ll hit them and they could _die!_ ”  
  
“Okay, but consider: if we get caught by the Garrison, _we’re_ gonna die,” Pidge said.  
  
“How fast are we going, anyway?” Lance said.  
  
“Forty,” Pidge said. “We’re still about ten miles away from the landing site. So we should speed up, and beat them there.”  
  
“…shit,” Lance said.  
  
“What is it now?” Hunk said.  
  
“We’re leading them right to the site. Think about it! When we were going twenty, so were they. They could totally surround us right now and cut us off, but they’re not.”  
  
“We have the coordinates,” Pidge said, horror and realization in his voice. “They don’t.”  
  
“That’s…a really good plan, actually,” Hunk said. “I hate that it was used on us, but objectively? That’s a good plan. So what do we do?”  
  
“There’s no way we can fight them off. And trying to lose them isn’t going to work,” Lance said. “We have to crash.”  
  
“ _What?_ ” Hunk said, jerking the wheel.   
  
“Speed up a bit, just for a few miles, then we all get out and go on foot but leave the car going so that it’ll crash. They’ll be distracted by the wreckage and we go investigate. We’re close enough to make it on foot, right Pidge?”  
  
“It’ll take a while, but yeah.”  
  
“Am I the only person here who realizes what a bad idea this is? Right now we’re in a few tons of metal moving very, _very_ fast and you want to switch that out to go on foot! We’ll be slower and easier to capture if we go on foot!”   
  
“Well, we can’t just lead them right to the landing site! The poor aliens will get captured by the Garrison and experimented on and it’ll all be our fault!”  
  
“Aliens? Nobody said anything about aliens!”  
  
“Hunk, we’re going to investigate a spaceship landing site. They’re probably from Pidge’s home planet or something.”  
  
“Lance,” Pidge growled.  
  
“I’m just saying. I’ve seen the way you type, man, there’s no way you’re human.”  
  
He could imagine Pidge’s eye twitch. It was a very satisfying twitch.  
  
“You know, Hunk, we’d go faster if we dropped the dead weight. They’d get distracted trying to not hit him, and then they’d have to take him back to the Garrison. We could make a getaway.”  
  
“Better plan. Hang on.” Lance couldn’t see much of what Hunk was doing, but the car skidded and spiraled. “Let’s go!”  
  
They jumped out of the car and watched it crash into the lead of the Garrison cars, the sparks it threw casting strange shadows in the darkness.   
  
“Hunk, that was awesome!” Lance crowed.  
  
Hunk laughed weakly. “Yeah, I guess it was pretty cool.”  
  
“Man, we need to sneak out more often if it means doing _that_ more.”  
  
“Please no.”  
  
A small light flickered on. “We’re not too far from the site,” Pidge said. “Only about a mile. Hope everyone is ready for a hike.”  
  
—  
  
If Hunk was anxious about sneaking out already, he wasn’t sure if there was an appropriate word for how he felt about going to investigate an alien spaceship that just crash-landed in the desert at night.   
  
“You okay?” Pidge said.   
  
“Little nervous.”  
  
He snorted. “Sure, a little nervous. Sorry about dragging you out here.”  
  
Hunk ruffled Pidge’s hair. “If I don't think about everything that could possibly go wrong, it’s not so bad."  
  
“…I’m just going to throw this idea out there: that’s not a good plan.”  
  
“Well, if I didn’t do things that made me anxious, I would never leave the kitchen.”  
  
“Hey, guys, whatcha talking about?”  
  
“The nunya principle,” Pidge said.  
  
“Should I know what that is?” Lance hissed to Hunk.  
  
“Lance. Think about it.” Considering how fond he was of updog, this really shouldn’t be hard for him to notice, but there it was.   
  
“It’s nunya business,” Pidge said.   
  
Lance groaned. “And so the hunter—“  
  
“Don’t,” Pidge and Hunk said in unison.  
  
They walked in silence for a while. The shadow of the Tehachapis loomed dark against the stars. Somehow, Hunk thought they would be…shorter. More mountain-shaped.   
  
“Hey, shouldn’t we have seen the ship by now?” Lance said. “We _are_ going the right way, right?”  
  
“Yeah,” Pidge said. “We’re right at the spot. He should have landed already. Or we’d see him in the sky.”  
  
“Maybe his coordinates were off, and he landed somewhere else. Can you radio him?”  
  
“Guys,” Hunk said. “I don’t think the coordinates were off. Pidge, give me the light.” He handed it over. Hunk turned it on, and the dark shadow gleamed. “Thought so. Guys, we just found the alien spaceship.”  
  
“We need to find the cockpit,” Pidge said, scrambling up the side of the shuttle.  
  
It was difficult in the dark, even with the flashlight, to find anything. The design didn’t follow any Earth standard, and there was no telling if they’d even be able to find the cockpit. It might even be underneath the shuttle.   
  
“Found it!” Lance cried.   
  
…or not.   
  
There was a transparent panel of hull, revealing a man strapped to a seat. He did not look like he had been having a good day; there was a trickle of blood at his temple, and the white streak in his hair gleamed in the light. A broad scar ran across his nose.   
  
“Matt?” Pidge said.  
  
A few details about Pidge came together in a suspicious way. It didn’t take a genius to connect the only Saami at the Garrison with the only other Saami astronauts, especially considering Pidge’s reaction every time someone mentioned the Kerberos mission. Plus, Pidge had called the person on the radio ‘brother,’ and seeing them next to each other, there was a strong resemblance.   
  
“Let’s get him out,” Lance said.  
  
It took some work to get the panel off, but they managed it somehow. Pidge crawled down into the cockpit. Hunk could hear him muttering as he unclipped the man from the seat.  
  
Bright lights behind them made Hunk and Lance turn to find a teenager on a hoverbike. The wind of the engines whipped at their clothes and hair.   
  
“Keith?” Lance said. The boy stopped short.   
  
“Who are you?”  
  
“Who am I? Uh, the name’s _Lance_.” Hunk idly wished he had popcorn. This was shaping up to be a train wreck. “We were in the same class at the Garrison?”  
  
“Really, were you an engineer?”  
  
“What? No! I was a pilot! We were rivals? You know, Lance and Keith, neck-and-neck?”  
  
“Oh, I remember you now. You’re a cargo pilot.”  
  
“Well, not anymore. I’m fighter class now, thanks to you dropping out.”  
  
“You’re not anything anymore, because we’re about to get expelled,” Pidge said, Matt draped over her shoulders and feet trailing on the ground. “The Garrison just caught up to us. Unless someone’s got a getaway car handy, we’re screwed.”  
  
—  
  
“So, Pidge. Pigeon. Pidgelet. Pidgeling. Pidge-asaur.” Lance poked him in the arm with every name.   
  
“What do you want, Lance.”   
  
“Oh, nothing, just wondering how you managed to recognize Matt in the dark after he’s been _missing for a year_?”  
  
“He’s my hero,” Pidge said, voice soft. “I joined the Garrison because of him.” It would have been a touching moment, which meant Lance was duty bound by older brother rules to tease him for it. If Pidge didn’t want him to tease, he shouldn’t have started calling Lance brother.  
  
“You have a massive crush on him.”  
  
“I do not!” Pidge squawked.   
  
“Bet you have a poster with his face on it back in the Garrison. No shame, no shame, I have one of Shiro.”  
  
“I don’t. Have. Posters.”  
  
“Do you keep a picture of him under your pillow at night?”  
  
“Shut up, Lance.”  
  
“Oooh, Pidgey has a crush~”  
  
“I do not!”  
  
—  
  
Matt came to with a pounding headache and a bone-deep ache in his…well, everything.   
  
He cracked his eyes open, taking stock. He was on a bed, a thin blanket covering his legs. Someone was holding his hand. His eyes flicked over to it, and he suppressed a shudder of revulsion. Metal digits wrapped around pale flesh. He turned his head slightly, tracing up the arm—a shirt he vaguely recognized as being one of his—and it was like looking into a mirror: short ginger hair, a constellation of freckles across the span of her nose, and glasses smushed up into her face. She was half in a chair, half on the bed beside him, fast asleep.  
  
What was Katie doing here? Had she been—no, he had escaped. He was on Earth. His memories were vague and fuzzy, but he remembered that much. Remembered hearing her voice on the radio, the impossible syllables of _vïelle_.   
  
He tried to pull his hand free, careful not to crush her hand. It was alien technology, who knew how dangerous it could be? Alien technology on the end of his arm. Once that would have been the most exciting thing he could think of. Now…now it was a nightmare.   
  
“Matt?” Katie said, her voice still sleep-muffled.   
  
“Shhh,” he whispered. “Go back to sleep.”  
  
Her hand tightened around his, squeezing gently, and she closed her eyes again.   
  
Dawn light spilled through the cracks in the blinds. Where even was he?  
  
He slid out of bed, carefully taking his hand back from Katie’s grip, and padded around the room. Someone had left some clothes out, neatly folded: a dark gray shirt and matching cargo pants. A belt sat on top of them, complete with side pouches, and a long coat hung over the back of the chair. It was nice to finally get out of the prisoner uniform. Now, all he needed was a shower and actual food, and he might actually feel somewhat human again.  
  
Katie was still slumped over in a chair. Someone had tucked a blanket around her shoulders, but she was going to mess up her back sleeping like that.   
  
He lifted her up, careful not to hurt her with the metal hand, and tucked her into bed. He kissed her forehead, like she was five again and falling asleep on his back, and left her to sleep.  
  
Three boys were scattered around the main room, all asleep. He picked his way around their legs and outside into the desert.   
  
So: he was on Earth, in the desert. His sister and some of her friends had found him, probably when he landed.   
  
There was something niggling at the back of his mind. Something important that he couldn’t remember. He closed his eyes and tried to recall. Someone had done something to the metal hand and—  
  
Nothing. Just vague, fuzzy images and darkness.   
  
He stared at the hand, watching the metal fingers move. It _felt_ like his hand, the nerve receptors activating and sending commands just like a flesh arm would, but he could also feel the aching pain just above where his elbow should be.   
  
“Matt,” Katie said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “What happened out there?”  
  
“I’m not sure. I don’t remember any of it.”  
  
“I see.” Her voice was quiet.   
  
“Katie—“ he began, then stopped short. He didn’t know how to put his thoughts into words; how relieved he was to see her, how worried he had been. The memories that were following him, unseen.   
  
“About that, um. They don’t know I’m a girl, so…I’ve been going by Pidge and pretending to be a boy.”  
  
“What? _Why?_ ”  
  
She sighed. “After you guys went missing, they told us that you were dead, but I didn’t believe that. So I hacked into the Garrison, but got caught and banned, so I made a fake identity: a boy named Pidge Gunderson, and enrolled as a student.” The worst part is how she grinned like that _wasn’t_ the worst plan he had ever heard.   
  
He buried his face in his hands. “Why are you like this,” he mumbled.   
  
“I did it to find you!”  
  
“What were you going to do after you found me? Let’s say your plan worked and you found out I had been captured by aliens, what were you going to do then?”  
  
Katie opened her mouth to answer, paused, and closed her mouth again. “I didn’t really think that far ahead, honestly.”  
  
“Of course you didn’t. Does Mom know where you are?”  
  
“Sorta? I told her I was going to the Garrison, I just…didn’t tell her about the secret identity stuff.”  
  
“Well, at least you didn’t just abandon her completely.” He resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. Who knew what would happen if he tried that with the metal hand? “Look, I’ll keep your secret. I’ve done that before. Just…think about it. I don’t want you to get hurt.”  
  
“I know.”   
  
The sun rose, and Matt breathed the morning air in deeply, smiling. He was finally home.


	2. Chapter 2

Keith was still not sure how he got into this mess. One minute he was going to investigate whatever the prophesied “return” was, and the next, there were four more people on his hoverbike than his hoverbike could really hold, and they were running from the Garrison. 

He exhaled, the sharp tang of the smoke orange-brown on his tongue, tapped the ash off the cigarette, and tried not to think about Shiro’s disappointed look. It felt like sevens, cold and sharp.

His mind kept replaying that moment, Lance’s face in the headlights, the light in his eyes fading as Keith lied. The burst of hurt when Keith said cargo pilot. The feeling of eleven—guilt had always been eleven. Shiro would be disappointed. 

Pretty much everything Keith did these days would disappoint Shiro, if he ever found out. 

“Thought you quit those,” Lance said behind him. Keith wondered, a little bit bitter threes and a little bit nostalgic sixes, if his skin would still feel blue. 

“Fuck off,” Keith spat, taking a drag and blowing smoke out into the desert air. Some spiteful part of him wanted to blow it in Lance’s face and watch him cough. 

“Well, enjoy lung cancer,” Lance said. “While you sit out here and smoke your life away, _I’m_ going to be a pilot.” Keith could hear Lance’s shoes against the uneven slats of the back porch, the sound of the door opening. 

“Sure y’are,” he said. Lance’s feet stopped. “All the shit y’all pulled last night? Stealin’ n’ crashin’ a car? Kinda shit I’d pull? Yeah, you’re gonna be a _great_ pilot. Garrison’ll just _love_ to have y’all back, won’t they?” He was expecting burning, angry nines and got sharp sevens and bitter threes instead.

Lance was silent for a while. Keith watched the smoke fade out in the early morning light. “You never crashed.” 

“You don’t know that.” He stood up, turned to face him. Lance had gotten taller, in the past year, lost the last bits of baby fat on his cheeks. Keith could remember when he had to look down to see Lance. Now he was looking slightly up. 

There was a metaphor in that, but Keith had never liked poetry much.

They held eye contact. The desert seemed to hold its breath. 

“I should make breakfast,” Keith said, and brushed past Lance to the kitchen. 

It was a while before Lance came in. 

* * *

When Keith revealed the massive conspiracy board, all connected with red threads and thumbtacks, all Lance could think was _was this what you worked and waited for?_

“Holy crow,” he said out loud, because it really was a lot of work, all labelled in Keith’s surprisingly neat handwriting. 

“After getting booted from the Garrison, I was kinda…lost,” Keith explained. He _looked_ lost, small and young and scared. Lance buried the tiny twinge of guilt for not being there for him deep, _deep_ down. “Found myself drawn out here, like some energy was telling me to search.” 

“For what?” Pidge asked.

“I wasn’t sure at first, and then I found this area.” He pointed at the map, at a section of the mountains that was circled and labelled with _energy source?_ “Y’all remember that earthquake ‘bout six months ago? It revealed a bunch of caves, covered in these ancient markings. Some of them are petroglyphs, some are pictographs, but they all tell a slightly different story about a blue lion.”

“The blue lion,” Matt repeated, a little breathless. 

“Matt?” Pidge said. 

“I just remembered—we need to find it, fast. The aliens that captured us…they’re looking for it.”

“Well, last night I was rummaging through Pidge’s stuff, and I found this picture.” Hunk held up a photograph of a boy and a girl, hugging and grinning at the camera. “Look, it’s him and his girlfriend.”

“Give me that!” Pidge shouted, snatching the picture away before anyone could get a good look. “What were you doing in my stuff?”

“Well, I was looking for a snack. But then, I started reading through his notebook—“

_“What!”_

“—and I noticed that the repeating series of numbers the aliens are looking for looks a lot like a Fraunhofer line; the emission spectrum of an element, only this element doesn’t exist on Earth. Anyway I think it might be this blue lion thing, and I could build a machine to look for it, kinda like a blue lion Geiger counter.”

“Hunk, you’re a genius,” Lance said. 

“Yeah, it’s pretty cool. The graph looks like this.” He held up a sheet of paper, ripped from a notebook and covered in pencil marks. A jagged line had been traced out in pen. 

“So, you can detect this blue lion?” Keith said.

“Well…yes and no. I need the parts, and we’d need to be in the area, which I mean we kinda are already but probably up in the mountains closer to where you found the rock art. But yeah, I can find it.”

* * *

The desert was freezing at night, and broiling during the day. It wasn’t as bad now as it would be in summer, which did not mean it wasn’t hot. 

By the third hour of hiking over mountains, Pidge could feel her face burning. 

“You okay?” Hunk asked. Pidge glared at him weakly. 

“Peachy. I’m just turning into a puddle, you know, the usual.”

“…So,” Hunk said, voice low, “You and Matt are pretty much identical. Is that just because you share an ethnicity, or are you, oh gee, I don’t know, blood relatives? I heard you back at the Garrison, I know you’re close to him.”

Pidge stumbled and nearly fell. Hunk grabbed her by the shoulders.

“You can’t tell anyone,” she said. “I swear, Hunk, if you tell anyone, I’ll kill you and nobody will ever find the body.”

“I won’t.”

“Hey, Hunk!” Keith said. “You getting anything on that Geiger counter?”

“Let me check!” Hunk pulled it out and handed Pidge the probe. She began scanning rocks and boulders, listening to the beep. “Nothing, yet.”

“Well, we’re here.” 

It didn’t look very important; just boulders piled up and dark fissures in the stone, but one cave made the Geiger counter beep wildly. 

They stepped inside one of the fissures, and Pidge nearly sobbed at the cool air and shadow on her burnt face and neck. 

Matt noticed, because of course he did, and whispered a prayer to Njávesheatne. 

“I really don’t think that’s going to help,” she said. 

“Can’t hurt,” he said with a shrug. 

The carvings on the walls were unlike anything Pidge had seen before, but Matt had a strange look on his face. 

“Matt?” she said, putting a hand on his arm. 

“It’s nothing. Just…familiar, somehow.”

The room lit up blue. The carvings were glowing with an unnatural light, and nearly humming.

“Lance, what did you do?” Hunk said. 

“I didn’t do anything, I just touched the wall!”

The floor dropped out from under them, and they tumbled into the darkness. 

* * *

Lance pulled himself out of the pool that they landed in, shaking algae out of his hair. The cavern was filled with blue light. Standing proudly in the center of the room was a massive robotic lion, painted blue. There was some kind of force field around her, glowing blue like the carvings had. Her yellow eyes seemed to follow Lance as he approached her.

“Does anyone else get the feeling that this thing is staring at them?”

“No,” Hunk said. 

“Yeah, she’s totally watching me.”

“She?”

“I dunno, I just have this feeling. You know?”

“Not really, man.”

“Does look more like a lioness than a lion, since it doesn’t have a mane.” Keith said. “Allowing as how lions don’t really have gender identity.” He went up to it, putting his hands on the force field. “So how do we get in?” he asked. 

“Maybe you just have to knock.” Lance did exactly that, and the shield dissolved into light.

A dark blue sky, speckled with stars—brilliant silver bands stretched across the sky—five colored streaks, blue and yellow and red and green and purple so dark it was nearly black—lions, brilliant and bold, terrible and awesome—a lion man, towering so high as to scrape the dome of the sky—

They were back in the cave, the afterimages fading from their eyes. 

“Voltron is a robot!” Hunk said. “Voltron is a huge, _huge_ awesome robot!”

“And this is only one part of it,” Pidge added. “I wonder where the rest of it is?”

“This is what they’re looking for,” Matt said. 

The lion moved, crouching down in front of them. Lance’s jacket whipped in the wind. She opened her mouth, and Lance suddenly knew what he should do. 

He went inside. 

* * *

The lion crashed through the walls of the cavern, and Hunk wanted absolutely nothing more than to curl up into a small ball on the ground and die. His stomach was doing its best to crawl out of his mouth.

“Make it stop, make it stop,” he whined. 

“I’m not _making_ her do anything!”

The lion lifted off, rockets firing and sending them all lurching. 

“Where are you going?” Keith said. 

“I just said I’m not making her do anything? She says there’s an alien ship approaching Earth.”

“She talks?” Pidge said. 

“Well, not in words, exactly, more like feeding ideas into my brain. Sort of.”  
  
They were all going to die. They were in some kind of futuristic alien cat head, and they were all going to die. 

“If this thing is the weapon they’re coming for,” he said, “Maybe we should, I dunno, give it to them? Maybe they’ll leave us alone.”

“Hunk, when has appeasement ever worked out well for us, literally ever,” Pidge said.

“I’m just saying, you know, keep our options open. Try to negotiate, maybe.”

“You don’t understand,” Matt said. “These monsters spread like a plague across the universe, destroying everything in their path. There’s no bargaining with them. They won’t stop until everything is dead.”

“Oh. Never mind, then.”

They got outside of the atmosphere, away from the gravitational pull of Earth, and found themselves face to face with an alien warship. Or, well, lion head to…side of the ship? 

“They found me,” Matt said. 

Hunk, personally, was pretty sure that they found the giant blue lion they were in. It was a bit easier to spot than one man inside the lion.

The world lit up purple, beams of light firing at all angles at them, and Hunk’s stomach crawled up his throat as Lance twisted the lion around the lasers.

People were screaming. Hunk was pretty sure that at least half of the screams were him. At some point while Hunk was distracted by screaming in mortal terror, they had decided to run away, except that the ship was still right behind them.  
  
“They’re gaining on us,” Pidge said. 

“It’s weird,” Lance said. “They’re not trying to shoot us or anything, they’re just chasing.”

“Would y’all _rather_ have aliens shooting at us?” Keith said. “Where are we, anyway?”

“The edge of the solar system,” Matt said quietly. “That’s Kerberos.” It hung in space, white against the blackness. 

“It takes months for our ships to get out this far!” Pidge said. “We got out here in what, five seconds?” 

The stars swirled outside the lion, spiraling and glowing. An ornate, glowing circle surrounded it. 

“What is that?” Hunk said. It looked like it was some kind of scifi science-ignoring bullshit. Hunk distrusted it immediately.

“I think the lion wants us to go through there,” Lance said.

“Where does it go?” Pidge asked, which was a very good point. 

“I…I don’t know,” Lance said, “Matt, you’re the senior officer here. What should we do?”

“What,” Matt and Pidge said in unison. 

“I’m not a senior officer,” Matt explained. “I’m not an officer at all, I’m—well, I _was_ —an independent contractor. I don’t outrank you except in age and in experience. So I think we should go through, but we should decide together.”

Pidge put his hand on Lance’s shoulder. Hunk was still not entirely sure about this whole thing, but put his hand on Lance’s other shoulder. 

“Alright,” Lance said, “Guess we’re all ditching class tomorrow.”

They flew through the wormhole, and Hunk regretted every choice that had lead him to this point.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> projecting onto fictional characters and you can't stop me


End file.
